Hatching

Well, we bought an incubator, hoping in the long term it will pay off helping with our egg-layer flock rotation.  Our first hatching experiment was this:

Day 1, we set 20 eggs.

Then, we let them sit...I only opened to add water occasionally to keep the humidity where it should be (40% or so).  

Day 14-ish, I candled the eggs.  I only removed one that I knew for SURE was not fertile.  I suspected others were not as well, but I wasn't confident in my candling abilities, so I left some of them.  Here is a cool video of candling of one of the eggs when I saw the chick move:

IMG 1604 from Sonia Cushing on Vimeo.

Day 20, one day before scheduled hatch...we saw a few pips!  This one is tiny, but you can see it if you look close :)

Day 20 - Here is a video of one hatching.  I apologize for the loud fan noise!

IMG 1679 from Sonia Cushing on Vimeo.

All in all we had 10 out of 20 eggs hatch.  One that hatched died a few days later, and an eggtopsy revealed one fully formed chick that just never hatched, and several that had started to develop but quit at some point.  About 5 of the eggs appeared not fertile (in total, including the one that I had removed on day 14.

Here are the one day old chicks (and kids!): 

 Here's Maggie with Lucky, our little sick one that never did make it. 

 This last one is a buckevelder (daddy was a Buckeye, mama was a Barnevelder...perhaps our lovely Blizzard that has since died).

Aren't they adorable?!  They are the fastest chicks I've ever seen...seriously, we will definitely name one Bullet...or Lightening...or Speedy :)

And here they are at nearly two weeks old! Feathering out nicely!  They got new bedding and a small roost today too, they are quite happy.